Assassination Vacation (22 page)

And, while we’re on the subject of Central Park and McKinley and Hearst, northeast of the
Maine
memorial, up the block from the park’s 102nd Street entrance, is a monument to Hearst’s most powerful editor and columnist, Arthur Brisbane. A pink granite job with a portrait of Brisbane in profile and a bench to sit on, it lauds Brisbane as “a champion of work and peace before all mankind.” Never mind that after the McKinley assassination, Hearst was excoriated for a column he published in the
New York Journal
five months before Leon Czolgosz pulled the trigger, an anonymous column generally attributed to Brisbane that said of the president, “If bad institutions and bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done.” Hearst’s enemies even spread the erroneous rumor that Czolgosz was carrying that
Journal
clipping in his pocket upon arrest. Hearst, scared for his life, started carrying a revolver. (The publisher lived another fifty years.)

That the
Maine
memorial stares across the asphalt at the Christopher Columbus statue on Columbus Circle is a reminder of just what the United States was up against taking on Spain — the empire of Columbus and Cortés. These people overpowered the Aztecs, took over Holland, parts of Italy, and France. Sure, Spain’s power had been on the decline since the Brits trounced its Armada in 1588, but they were so powerful and so rich from the conquistadors’ gold, it still took another three centuries to knock them down for good. In 1898, Spain still owned Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, which is to say they controlled Caribbean sugar as well as a couple of handy off ramps to the market of China. It says a lot about American military confidence that this upstart baby of a country was ready to challenge what had once been the mightiest empire since Rome. We had of course won the Revolutionary War against the British, but no one was certain if that marked our beginning as an international force to be reckoned with, or if it was a fluke victory inspired by our willingness to die before we’ll pay too many taxes.

Back in 1898, days before the
Maine
blew up, Hearst’s
Journal
published a letter attributed to a Spanish diplomat that accused McKinley of being “petty” and “weak.” The article’s subtle headline: “Worst Insult to the United States in Its History.”

At first President McKinley resisted going to war with Spain. The Civil War veteran lamented, “I’ve been through one war. I have seen the dead piled up, and I do not want to see another.”

Then, as now, optional wars are fought because there are people in the government who really, really want to fight them. The Paul Wolfowitz of McKinley’s first term, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, was a part of a group of young wonks from various branches of the government who had been arguing that it was in the American interest to wrench Cuba from the clutches of Spain. They feared what would happen if the unpredictable Cuban rebels governed themselves, they wanted American companies to get a piece of the Cuban sugar business — described as white gold then the way oil is nicknamed black gold now — and they thought Cuba would be a convenient base of operations from which to get cracking on that canal they hoped to one day build in Central America.

Roosevelt wanted all those things, but more than anything, he wanted to fight. He wanted to wear an outfit — I mean, uniform. He wanted — to use one of his favorite words — “adventure.” And he wanted these things so badly that once the United States declared war on Spain he resigned as assistant secretary of the navy, ordered himself a custom-tailored uniform from Brooks Brothers, and volunteered to fight as a comparatively lowly lieutenant colonel with the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry.

Roosevelt helped assemble the volunteer cavalry, a ragtag regiment of cowboys, Indians, Ivy League graduates, one genuine Dodge City marshal, and a Jew nicknamed “Porkchop,” that came to be known as the Rough Riders. He described the Rough Riders as men in “whose veins the blood stirred with the same impulse which once sent the Vikings over sea.”

And how did our Vikings fare? The war was over in four short months. America’s first time out in interventionist warfare with the aim of regime change was seen as such a success that it became known, in John Hay’s phrase, as the “splendid little war.” Success, hell; if Teddy Roosevelt is to be believed it was downright fun — in his memoir of his Rough Riders days, he can’t stop using the word “delighted.”

Marking my place in Roosevelt’s book, I went to the kitchen to fetch some tea. As I was putting the boiling cup on my desk, I focused on the Pan-American Exposition souvenir coaster I bought in Buffalo, the one with the two female continents holding hands. I used Roosevelt’s book as a coaster instead, holding up the Pan-Am logo to get a closer look.

The model for South America was Broadway actress Maxine Elliot. North America, a pretty blonde, was modeled on Maud Coleman Woods of Charlottesville, Virginia. (Sadly, she would die of typhoid fever that summer, ten days before McKinley arrived in Buffalo, thereby never living to see herself on a coaster, every southern belle’s dream.)

That North America would be symbolized by a Virginian, by the daughter of a Confederate army captain no less, would have been unthinkable before the Spanish-American War. It was the first conflict in which North and South cooperated after the Civil War.

McKinley and Mark Hanna, already innovators in corporate campaign contributions, were the first Republicans to actively woo white (male) southern Democrats. (The two made a point of vacationing in Thomasville, Georgia — where Hanna’s brother Mel had bought a plantation for cheap — in 1895, where they planned the ’96 campaign and courted local pols.)

Another milestone in the history of how the party of Lincoln became the party of, say, late South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, was a Spanish-American War victory speech McKinley delivered to the citizens of Atlanta, praising the Cuban campaign’s “magic healing, which has closed ancient wounds and effaced their scars.” Later on, McKinley then boiled down the story of the Civil War — on both sides — to merely the story of “American valor” (i.e., doesn’t matter which side you were on or what you thought you were fighting for, the point is, you put up a fight). It might be easy to laud these forgiving sentiments as almost Lincolnesque calls for peaceful coexistence, but Lincoln, in his Second Inaugural, was able to ask for reconciliation without lying about what was at stake, without demeaning one of the grisliest moral conflicts in all of history as some silly rite of passage that turned boys into men. Though McKinley and Hanna’s ploy was morally questionable, it was nevertheless political genius.

At the Pan-American Exposition, one of the exhibits embodied this revisionist history zeitgeist. It was called the Old Plantation, a celebration of the Old South complete with slave cabins and cotton fields, and featuring a black man billed as “Old Laughing Ben from Dublin, Georgia.” Because slavery: fun!

T
hough McKinley hesitated to go to war in the first place, he nevertheless warmed up to the idea of empire. After the U.S. Navy, under the command of Admiral George Dewey, had defeated the Spanish ships in Manila Bay in August of 1898 (with the help of the Filipino rebels who had been attacking the Spanish for years), McKinley debated whether or not to give our Filipino allies their independence or take over the archipelago as an American territory. Addressing some Methodist ministers after the fact, McKinley recalled his decision-making process this way:

I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way — I don’t know how it was, but it came…that we could not leave them to themselves — they were unfit for self-government — and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain’s was…that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.

Never mind that the Philippines were already largely Christianized, thanks to the Spanish missionaries who arrived in 1565 to convert the Filipinos to Catholicism. Still, these God-made-me presidential war rationales apparently never go out of fashion. In the 2003 State of the Union Address, President Bush — who back when he was governor of Texas confided in a televangelist friend, “I believe God wants me to run for president” — foreshadowed the coming Iraqi war by claiming, “We Americans have faith in ourselves but not in ourselves alone.” If you think he is referring to the United Nations, guess again. “We do not know — we do not claim to know all the ways of Providence,” he continued, “yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life and all of history.”

When President McKinley delivered the last speech of his life, at the Pan-Am on September 5, 1901, he said, “Expositions are the time keepers of progress.” He was alluding to the exhibits devoted to technological advancement — cash registers and mining and hot air balloons, a peculiar building full of infant incubators in which tourists stared at low-birthweight babies as lightbulbs warmed them to health. But it’s just as true to see the exposition as a fly trapped in amber, an accounting of American racial attitudes as seen in the ethnological displays — the aforementioned Old Plantation, “Darkest Africa.” There were also fake battles between American Indians and U.S. cavalry staged in the sports arena. (Guess who always won?)

An inscription on the Department of Agriculture Building at the exposition read: “To the ancient races of America, for whom the New World was the Old, that their love of freedom and of nature, their hardy courage, their monuments, arts, legends and strange songs may not perish from the earth.” I would imagine that if you were one of the Filipinos employed at the exposition to tend the water buffalo in the Philippine village and you read this slogan, which can be summarized as
we might exterminate you but we’ll be sure and put your pottery in our museums,
you might get nervous about current events back home.

The Spanish-American War is often cited as the United States’ first interventionist attack on foreign soil. That’s only true if you’re not counting U.S. wars against the nations of the Sioux, the Nez Percé, the Apaches, the Blackfoot, the Creek, Choctaw, Seminole, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and so on. After God told McKinley to “annex” the Philippines, our former allies the Filipino rebels fought back in a nasty guerrilla war that dragged on for years in which both sides committed torture (the famous “water cure” in which dirty water is poured down a person’s throat until he drowns) and atrocities (such as setting buildings on fire with people asleep inside).

Many of the American soldiers and officers who were torturing Philippine rebels (who then tortured them right back) were veterans of the Indian Wars on this continent. On the island of Samar, for example, American troops fought under the command of Wounded Knee alumnus Jacob Smith, who applied skills in the Pacific he had learned slaughtering the Lakota Sioux in South Dakota. After a cunning but brutal ambush by the Filipino guerrillas, Smith ordered his troops to retaliate by shooting to kill every Filipino capable of bearing arms. When asked to pin down a minimum age for the murderees, Smith decided on ten. If it seems distasteful and condescending to read that then-governor of the Philippines William Howard Taft referred to the local citizenry as his “little brown brothers,” that’s downright sweet compared to what the soldiers called them — “niggers.” As one U.S. soldier stationed in the Philippines put it, “The country won’t be pacified until the niggers are killed off like the Indians.”

Mark Twain had supported the 1898 invasion of Cuba because “it is a worthy thing to fight for one’s freedom; it is another sight finer to fight for another man’s.” But he called the Philippines situation a “quagmire,” writing an editorial in the February 1901 issue of
North American Review
called “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” He wrote, “We have stabbed an ally in the back,” going on to suggest that a new American flag should be sewn especially for the province “with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.”

Leon Czolgosz, confiding in a fellow anarchist not long before he shot McKinley, said of the war in the Philippines, “It does not harmonize with the teachings in our public schools about our flag.”